1492 eBook

There rose a cry, it was so beautiful! The Admiral
named it Vega Real, the Royal Plain.

Sweating, panting, we came at last down that most
difficult descent into rolling forest and then to
a small bright stream, beside it garden patches and
fifty huts. The inhabitants fled madly, we heard
their frightened shouts and the screaming of children.
Thereafter we tried to keep in advance a small body
of Indians, so that they might tell that the gods
were coming, but that they would not injure.

Acclivity and declivity fell away. We were fully
in an enormous, fertile and populous plain.

The horses and the horsemen! At first they thought
that these were one. When some cowering group
was surrounded and kept from breaking away, when Alonso
de Ojeda or another leaped from steed to earth, from
earth again to steed, they moaned with astonishment
and some relief. But the horses, the horses—­never
to have seen any great four-footed things, and now
these that were proud and pawed the earth and neighed
and—­De Ojeda’s black horse—­reared,
curvetted, bounded, appeared to threaten! The
eyes, the mane, the great teeth!—­There
grew a legend that they were fed upon men’s
flesh, red men’s flesh!

How many red men were in Quisquaya I do not know.
In some regions they dwelled thickly, in others were
few folk. In this wide, long, laughing plain
dwelled many, in clean towns sunk among trees good
to look at and dropping fruit; by river or smaller
stream, with plantings of maize, batata, cassava,
jucca, maguey, and I know not what beside. If
the stream was a considerable one, canoes. They
had parrots; they had the small silent dogs.
In some places we saw clay pots and bowls. They
wove their cotton, though not very skillfully.
They crushed their maize in hand mills. We found
caciques and butios, and heard of their main cacique,
Gwarionex. But he did not come to meet us; they
said he had gone on a visit to Caonabo in Cibao.
They brought us food and took our gifts in exchange;
they harangued us in answer to our harangues; they
made dances for us. The children thronged around,
fearless now and curious. The women were kind.
Old men and women together, and sometimes more women
than men, sat in a council ring about some venerable
tree.

There was no quarrel and no oppression upon this adventure.
I look back and I see that single journey in Hispaniola
a flower and pattern of what might be.

They gave us what gold they had—­freely—­and
we gave in return things that they prized. But
always they said Cibao for gold.

We rode and marched afoot, with many halts and turns
aside, five leagues across plain. A large river
barred our way,—­the Yaqui they called it.
Here we spent two days in a village a bowshot from
the water. We searched for gold, we sent from
Indian to Indian rumor that it was the highest magic,
god-magic that of all things in the world we most
desired and took it from their hands, yet still we
paid for it in goods for which they lusted, and we
neither forced nor threatened force. And though
we were four hundred, yet there might be in the Royal
Plain forty thousand, and their hue and their economy
was yet prince in the land, and the Spaniard a visitor.
And there commanded the four hundred a humane man,
with something of the guilelessness of the child.